Culture Club

My Dear Princess and Dear Fellows,

Another lovely chat with the Princess last night. I absolutely love hearing your voice, it brings me right back to Edinburgh with you. All I need is to be completely w@nkered and it would complete the magic.

There's something to think about for next time.

But no. I live in New Zealand now and one of the things I love about this country - love love LOVE - is that the whole of New Zealand appears to be listening to my iPod! All of it! All the time!

I mean, back in the UK, you couldn't walk through a shop without hearing some effing auto-tuned warbler w@nking on about some bloody thing. But here, I walk along the street and I hear...

"We belong to the light we belong to the thuuuunder! I'm holding out for a heeeero to the end of the night! SHE'S AN EASY LOV-ER! You're as cold as ice, willin' to sacrifice our love... I travel the world and the seven seas, everybody's looking for something... I don't wanna sleep I just wanna KEEP ON LOVIN' YOOOOOO it's the final countdown give a little respeeeect tooooOOOO meeeeeeeeeeeeeeee WILD BOYS WILD BOYS!!"

"It's like living in f***ing 'Stranger Things'" said Er Indoors. 

But I love it and have trouble not having karaoke moments all the time. If you ever come across a YouTube video of "Sad Middle-Aged Man Does Flashdance in Wellington Street", that will be me.

So NZ culture is subtly different from the UK. It's a weird mash-up of old and new, US and UK. Corrie is on the telly, but they have rodeos and drag racing. Roller Derby is HUGE.

If you didn't know, roller derby is a competitive sport wherein middle-aged mums form themselves into teams and then speed-skate around and around a track until someone is horribly murdered. I'm not kidding. It is like a cross between a Zumba class and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre". The thing is, these ladies are full of rage and need a means to channel it.

They have teenage sons who won't clean their rooms and daughters who are going out with spotty boyfriends and husbands who want to watch the sport instead of fixing the guttering

AND THEY ARE P*SSED.

I know this for a fact because Feefs was in a team. Because the sport is all-female, and because men are weirdo pervert freaks, all the players must have "handles" and alter-egos to make it harder for stalkers to stalk them. Feefs's roller derby handle was "Fe Kill Matter". Tasteful. 

Fe would occasionally send us the odd picture in an email. We thought she'd been dabbling in abstract art. Whirls of crazy colours that looked like a nebula being eaten by an amoeba. 

"That's a picture of my @rse," Fe would clarify. "You should see my thigh after last night's match."

But she LOVED it. It let her expunge all that pent up mum-anger on other mums. And she loved her alter-ego too. Even though she no longer takes part in the sport (she ditched it for crossfit) she still occasionally dons the costume and behaves outrageously.

"Fe Kill Matter can do things I could never do," she says. She makes it sound like her secret superhero identity.

It is all very non-UK. And I'm still adapting. I'm not sure I will ever take part in roller derby firstly because I'm not a lady and also because I want to live. But I do like the fact that these opportunities are here in NZ. And that it is a country which seemed DETERMINED not to take itself seriously.

WILD BOYS WILD BOYS.

Sorry. It's stuck in my head now.

S.